Tweet of the Week – ‘big climate’ and ‘big tobacco’

Skeptics routinely get smeared by Al Gore, Michael Mann, and others of being like and/or in the employ of “Big Oil’, ‘Big Coal’, or “Big Tobacco’. Yet many of the same people who hurl such accusations seem blind to their own ‘big’ predicament. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. had this to say about that in a series of tweets today.

The science issues of NFL/concussions has some similarities w/ tobacco/industry & also with those in climate science http://t.co/G0UqgsD2co

I think you are misinterpreting what RPJ is trying to say. As an “honest broker”, I think he’s trying to say that big climate, i.e., those researchers, NGO’s, and activists who have an economic incentive in keeping the meme of imminent climate disaster in the forefront so they can reap as much governmental money from the tax payers as possible, are in fact behaving like big tobacco or corporate NFL did in clouding the truth for their own economic justifications. The comment about the IPCC is confusing and I cannot defend it unless RPJ simply truncated his comment to such a degree that it simply came out wrong.

“Big Tobacco is history, and the IPCC is back on track..” The ignorance he displays should be embarrassing to him (and his father). He’s obviously not tracking tobacco stock sales and stock prices. He apparently failed to notice the IPCC, in their predictions, is stepping away from the models he holds so dear. Maybe he’s right about the NFL …

Pielke Jr. spends a lot of time on the economics of extreme climate events. He has the opinion that IPCC’s AR-5 and SREX reports in this area reflect science and uncertainty better by having backed off significantly from the more alarmist claims of earlier reports.

It’s worth looking at the actual language of the reports to verify this rather than listening to the media coverage. IPCC has become much more moderate and cautious in some areas – not all.

That’s my guess for the “back on track” comment. Pielke Jr. is also likely to show up here to explain himself!

The IPCC is no longer the source of AGW extremism. The IPCC has in fact moderated its views on climate change and attribution quite a bit. To that extent it can be said “the IPCC is back on track” with a straight face.
That is why the AGW hype industry is ignoring the IPCC more and more.
But, as he and many others have pointed out, the IPCC still suffers from the fatal flaw of being controlled by political decision makers.

Using twitter isn’t as easy as it looks. Whittling one’s thoughts down to 140 characters requires some awareness of how your reader will receive it. Clarity and brevity are difficult to merge successfully and RP Jr. needs more practice.

With that said, I’m tired of the comparisons between the science of climate change and research in other fields. With both tobacco and concussions there are a number of independent “experiments” available, as each smoker and NFL player represents a trial, and every non-smoker and individual without a concussion is a control. It’s possible to compare data from a huge number of people reach a statistically valid conclusion. There is only one Earth.

A better comparison would be climate sensitivity vs. Hubble constant. Alarmists won’t use it because it’s not as interesting a people dying of cancer or brain damage. That shouldn’t matter, however, because this is supposed to be science, not marketing. The Hubble constant has been worked on since the 1920’s and the current range of accepted values is about 1/20th of where they started. The range is still immense with some published figures being almost double those of competing studies done at nearly the same time.

Sorry for the length of this. I suppose I could have just written:
ClmteSci =/=MedSci ya dope. #bonehead/alarmists

Far be it from me to lead a cheerleading section for the IPCC but many of the comments in the AR5 WGI Chapter 2 on extremes do sound fairly cautious and moderate (from Pielke Jr.’s blog). Of course this is before the political process puts a scary spin on the science.

•“Overall, the most robust global changes in climate extremes are seen in measures of daily temperature, including to some extent, heat waves. Precipitation extremes also appear to be increasing, but there is large spatial variability”
•”There is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”
•“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
•“In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”
•“In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems”
•“In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”
•“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low”

Football is tough on the body? Who knew?…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But it is the drive to and from the football game that can kill you.

I really hate the wrapped Cotton Batting Syndrome. Next thing you know parents will be required to put helmets and knee pads and elbow pads and bum pads on babies learning to walk and if they do not they will be accused of ‘Child Abuse’ and the child taken by the state and put in foster care.

Ahhh the tobacco thingey again. If you look very closely and don’t inhale you will see smoke.

STRIKE 1Al Gore, the climate change campaigner, has been quoted in 1996 by the New York Times saying:

“Throughout most of my life, I’ve raised tobacco,”……..”I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it.”

Earlier in the same article the New York Times said:

“Six years after Vice President Al Gore’s older sister died of lung cancer in 1984, he was still accepting campaign contributions from tobacco interests. Four years after she died, while campaigning for President in North Carolina, he boasted of his experiences in the tobacco fields and curing barns of his native Tennessee….”

“British American Tobacco Biodiversity Partnership: Fauna & Flora International, the Tropical Biology Association and Earthwatch Institute. Through the Partnership, we are involved in more than 30 biodiversity projects worldwide.

“Earthwatch partners with organizations across all sectors of business to improve both environmental and corporate sustainability…….British American Tobacco (BAT) is the world’s second-largest tobacco group,…..Royal Dutch Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies,”
Source:http://au.earthwatch.org/corporate-partnerships/partnership-profiles

Richard D says:
January 30, 2014 at 2:15 pm
Get rid of the pads, helmets and the huddle thing, where they stand around holding hands waiting for someone to tell them what to do next like a bunch of big, stupid, babies.

Well said. If anyone want to see the original game consisting of just a field, men and balls, tune into the six nations over the next few weeks and see how it should be played. By the way, as a health professional I can confirm that frequent blows to the head are strongly correlated with cerebral damage, in the same ways as boxers suffer as Muhammed Ali can demonstrate, It a much less complex correlation than the complexities of climate science and rather more obvious. As a result I’d be happy for my sons to play rugby, ( at a pinch) but advise them to avoid American football like the plague, not that it is played overly in Wales!

“…I can confirm that frequent blows to the head are strongly correlated with cerebral damage…”

As I said, who knew? But for most of their prime years and significantly beyond, they live like royalty. Fame, money, adoring women, children worshiping them as heroes… They get a lot more out of life than most people who maintain their faculties into late years. I know a lot of people who’d take that option in a heartbeat.

30 Jan: Reuters: US consultancy ICF wins bid to help plan China carbon market
U.S. consultancy ICF International has won a 5-million euro ($6.8 mln) contract to help the European Union advise China, the world’s biggest carbon-emitting nation, on designing a national emissions trading scheme (ETS).
ICF fought off competition from other carbon advisory firms eager to get involved in designing what is likely to be the world’s biggest emissions market, worth billions of dollars, when it launches before the end of the decade…
…and has sought expertise from Europe, which has operated its own market since 2005…
The EU project is one of several offering assistance to China in designing a nationwide carbon market. The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank are funding other initiatives. (Reporting by Stian Reklev; Editing by Joseph Radford)http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/01/30/china-carbon-idINL3N0L412J20140130

Wikipedia: ICF International
ICF International, formerly known as ICF Consulting, is a management, technology, and policy consulting firm based in Fairfax, Virginia…
ICF employs more than 4,500 employees in more than 60 offices worldwide. Washington Technology ranked ICF No. 64 in its “2011 Top 100” list of the largest government contractors based on prime contracting revenue…
ICF was founded in 1969 as the Inner City Fund, a venture capital firm established to finance inner-city businesses. Its first president was C. D. Lester, a former Tuskegee Airmen, who was joined by three U.S. Department of Defense analysts…
ICF’s Integrated Planning Model (IPM®), a detailed model of the electric power sector, has been used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in support of its air regulatory analysis for more than 15 years. ICF provides support to EPA in applying the model…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICF_International

LOL:

2013: Desmogblog: Ties That Bind: Ernest Moniz, Keystone XL Contractor, American Petroleum Institute and Fracked Gas Exports
Congress will review the Obama Administration’s nomination of Ernest Moniz for Secretary of the Department of Energy (DOE) in hearings that start today, April 9.
Moniz has come under fire for his outspoken support of nuclear power, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for shale gas and the overarching “all-of-the-above” energy policy advocated by both President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent in the last election, Mitt Romney…
As first revealed on DeSmogBlog, Moniz is also on the Board of Directors of ICF International, one of the three corporate consulting firms tasked to perform the Supplemental Environmental Impact Study (SEIS) for TransCanada’s Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline…
Moniz earned over $300,000 in financial compensation in his two years sitting on the Board at ICF, plus whatever money his 10,000+ shares of ICF stock have earned him…
Moniz’s American Petroleum Institute Ties to Shale Gas Export Advocacy
In this arena, the DOE – via the consulting firm National Economic Research Associates (NERA), a firm with historical ties to Big Tobacco – said exports of the U.S. shale gas bounty (LNG exports) were in the best economic interests of the U.S. in its long-awaited Dec. 2012 report…
If he receives congressional confirmation, this means Moniz will jump ship from his ICF Board of Directors position and have the final say over DOE LNG export decisions.
While heading the MIT Energy Initiative, Moniz also worked alongside John Deutch.
Deutch headed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under President Bill Clinton and now serves as head of the Board of Directors of Cheniere Energy, a corporation that owns many proposed LNG export terminals along the Gulf coast…
If he receives congressional confirmation, this means Moniz will jump ship from his ICF Board of Directors position and have the final say over DOE LNG export decisions.
Further, the Vice President of ICF International is Karl Hausker, the husband of Kathleen “Katie” McGinty, one of the members of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Hydraulic Fracturing Advisory Panel and also a member of the DOE fracking subcommittee. She recently threw her name into the ring as a Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate for the 2014 election in Pennsylvania…http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/04/09/ernest-moniz-keystone-xl-contractor-american-petroleum-institute-fracked-gas-exports

ICF International, formerly known as ICF Consulting, is a management, technology, and policy consulting firm based in Fairfax, Virginia…
ICF employs more than 4,500 employees in more than 60 offices worldwide. Washington Technology ranked ICF No. 64 in its “2011 Top 100″ list of the largest government contractors based on prime contracting revenue…
ICF was founded in 1969 as the Inner City Fund, a venture capital firm established to finance inner-city businesses. Its first president was C. D. Lester, a former Tuskegee Airmen, who was joined by three U.S. Department of Defense analysts…
ICF’s Integrated Planning Model (IPM®), a detailed model of the electric power sector, has been used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in support of its air regulatory analysis for more than 15 years. ICF provides support to EPA in applying the model…

Follow the money, follow the race to the money.
But only rich, greedy, capitalistic republics are eviiiiiiiiil when they attempt to make money … in the private sector. Now, making money off of company-to-politician connections? THAT’s cool and groovy. But only if the politician is democratic: So a CA democrat senator’s husband gets the single contract to build the billions+ California high speed railroad, ICF’s leaders get to flip between ICF and goverment agencies regulating oil, rails, pipelines, and energy, government laboratory heads become government energy department heads, …. democrat donors get ambassador appointments to Norway, China, the EU …

“As a result I’d be happy for my sons to play rugby, ( at a pinch) but advise them to avoid American football like the plague, not that it is played overly in Wales!”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A gentleman’s sport for sure. Notice the white collars on their jerseys!

u.k.(us) says: “I guess I’m Twittercapped“. Did you mean Twitterpated? Actually, if the IPCC gets its way, we’re all Twitterpated – as in Bambi in which a pair of animals were “twitterpating” and ended up with babies”.

By the way, as a health professional I can confirm that frequent blows to the head are strongly correlated with cerebral damage, in the same ways as boxers suffer as Muhammed Ali can demonstrate, It a much less complex correlation than the complexities of climate science and rather more obvious. As a result I’d be happy for my sons to play rugby, ( at a pinch) but advise them to avoid American football like the plague, not that it is played overly in Wales!

I played for years and yes rugby can be a little rough :) …..Too often head injuries in football are the result of the false security of helmets and using a helmeted head as a weapon/spear. American Football needs to protect its players better from brain injuries.

With this link between concussions and brain damage and football, we must remember that correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

For instance in the matter of brain damage, Hillary Clinton had a concussion and had to wear funny glasses for a while to straighten out her vision, but I’m sure she never played football. At least she hasn’t joined the NFL players concussion suit yet.

Actually the comment about the IPCC is possibly noting the fact that the IPCC views now actually reflect the sceptics better than the catastrophists – IE IPCC Extreme weather NOT related to CO2 etc. From what I can see there are only really two points of difference. The IPCC still declares positive feedback when the feedback is negative, and the IPCC underestimates the level of natural variation (Ie their statement that more than 50% of warming is CO2 related is wrong). With a change in just these two positions the IPCC would be on message for the sceptics – strange as it may seem. If fact many of the mainstream news items refuting catastrophist claims use the IPCC to cite from.

“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”

Translated, this means that the IPCC declares that only 50% can be relied upon as the likely increase in temperature due to CO2 (1951 to 2010). Warming 1850 to 1950 is presumably natural cyclic phenomenon- this implies that the net warming since the little ice age cannot be accepted to be more than 50% of total warming and manmade component less than about 30% (though the IPCC unwisely just declares a minimum rather than a range).

Using temperature rise VS CO2 rise since the LIA as a baseline , this in itself implies the climate has a sensitivity to CO2 of less than 0.8 degrees per doubling, and a sensitivity to the manmade, non- cyclic component of only 0.6 per doubling – Case closed.

Strangely, the IPCC does seem to be on trajectory to intersect mainstream sceptic views that sensitivity is between say 0.2 and 1 degree per doubling, even though the models still have gains that are too high, higher in fact than the IPCC concedes. Unfortunately, since this doesn’t feed into the UN’s world government agenda very well, I’m not overly confident that the trajectory will be maintained.

The IPCC still declares positive feedback when the feedback is negative
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Intuitively this is what makes little sense to me. How can there be positive feedback when historically temperature has been so consistent – varying by just a few degrees plus or minus. I’m more familiar with human biology where negative feedback is the norm and positive feedback is usually operating in an overall negative feedback, or else its usually bad BAD….